The social–ecological system framework as a knowledge classificatory system for benthic small-scale fisheries

Ostrom proposed the underpinnings of a framework for the systematic study of the governance of complex social–ecological systems. Here we hypothesize that Ostrom's social–ecological system framework can be useful to build a classification system for small-scale benthic fisheries, regarding their governance processes and outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to knowledge accumulation of benthic fisheries. To tailor the framework, we relied on discussions among experts and a systematic literature review of benthic fisheries from 1980 to 2010. This literature review helped us refine variable definitions and provide readers with illustrative reference papers. We then illustrate the approach and its potential contributions through two studies of the emergence of self-organization in Mexico and Chile. We highlight synthetic lessons from the cases and the overall approach as well as reflect on remaining challenges to the development of a social–ecological system framework as a diagnostic tool for knowledge accumulation and synthesis.     

An ecosystem approach to small-scale fisheries through participatory diagnosis in four tropical countries

Participatory diagnosis is an approach to identify, prioritize and mobilise around factors that constrain or enable effective governance and management in small-scale fisheries. Diagnostic frameworks are mostly designed and used for systematic scientific analysis or impact evaluation. Through participation they also have potential to guide contextually informed improvements to management in practice, including transitions to contemporary forms of governance like the ecosystem approach to fisheries (EAF)—the focus of our study. We document and critically reflect on participatory diagnosis processes and outcomes at sites in Indonesia, Philippines, Solomon Islands and Tanzania. These sites were part of an international project on the implementation of the EAF and differed widely in institutional and operational contexts. The Participatory Diagnosis and Adaptive Management framework and the “issue radar” diagnosis map were used to identify, evaluate and address factors associated with navigating management transitions towards the EAF. We found that many challenges and priority actions identified by participants were similar across the four study countries. Participants emphasized habitat restoration, particularly mangrove rehabilitation, and livelihood enhancement. The importance of strengthening governance entities, networks and processes (e.g., harmonization of policies, education and awareness of policies) was also a prominent outcome of the diagnosis. Site-specific factors were also explored together with the differing views among stakeholders. We conclude that diagnosis frameworks are indeed useful tools for guiding management transitions in fisheries, particularly where they enable flexibility in approaches to diagnosing problems and applying solutions to local contexts.     

The role of diversification in dynamic small-scale fisheries: Lessons from Baja California Sur,Mexico

Globally, small-scale fisheries are critical for livelihoods and food security yet face increasing uncertainty and variability from processes such as overfishing, globalization, and climate change. Enhancing the number of options for human response through increased access to marine resources, diverse livelihood approaches, and generalist fishing strategies may attenuate the negative effects of change and disturbance. My research explores the relative importance of diversification strategies for achieving resilient small-scale fishing communities and cooperatives of Baja California Sur, Mexico. Specifically, interview data and long-term catch and economic data were used to develop an economic metric of resilience, in addition to income diversification indices, for fishing cooperatives. Fishing cooperative characteristics and environmental conditions were then evaluated as possible predictors of cooperatives’ relative ability to diversify. I found that while diversification was important for risk mitigation and stabilizing income, the ability of cooperatives to specialize during favorable conditions may be important for poverty reduction and wealth accumulation. Thus, the flexibility to move across fishing strategies given changing environmental conditions is important for the adaptive capacity of small-scale fishing cooperatives. My findings will contribute to a better understanding of the institutional arrangements that promote a resilient small-scale fishery, and therefore, will be invaluable for practitioners of small-scale fisheries.     

Resilience: The emergence of a perspective for social–ecological systems analyses

The resilience perspective is increasingly used as an approach for understanding the dynamics of social–ecological systems. This article presents the origin of the resilience perspective and provides an overview of its development to date. With roots in one branch of ecology and the discovery of multiple basins of attraction in ecosystems in the 1960–1970s, it inspired social and environmental scientists to challenge the dominant stable equilibrium view. The resilience approach emphasizes non-linear dynamics, thresholds, uncertainty and surprise, how periods of gradual change interplay with periods of rapid change and how such dynamics interact across temporal and spatial scales. The history was dominated by empirical observations of ecosystem dynamics interpreted in mathematical models, developing into the adaptive management approach for responding to ecosystem change. Serious attempts to integrate the social dimension is currently taking place in resilience work reflected in the large numbers of sciences involved in explorative studies and new discoveries of linked social–ecological systems. Recent advances include understanding of social processes like, social learning and social memory, mental models and knowledge–system integration, visioning and scenario building, leadership, agents and actor groups, social networks, institutional and organizational inertia and change, adaptive capacity, transformability and systems of adaptive governance that allow for management of essential ecosystem services.     

Using social–ecological syndromes to understand impacts of international seafood trade on small-scale fisheries

Globalization has increased the speed and flow of people, information, and commodities across space, integrating markets and increasing interdependence of geographically dispersed places worldwide. Places historically driven by largely local forces and market demands are now increasingly affected by drivers at multiple scales. Trade is particularly important in driving these changes and more fish is now exported to international markets than ever before. When small-scale fisheries are integrated into global markets, local social–ecological systems change with potentially both positive and negative impacts on livelihoods, economics and ecology, but few studies systematically investigate how and why the outcomes of market integration vary from case to case.This paper systematically assesses multiple (social, ecological, economic and institutional) local effects of market integration in cases around the world by drawing on the global environmental change syndromes approach. Furthermore, we examine the factors contributing to the syndromes observed. Our analysis identifies three distinct social–ecological syndromes associated with international seafood trade. Results suggest that the presence of strong and well-enforced institutions is the principal factor behind the syndrome characterized by sustained fish stocks, while a combination of weak institutions, patron–client relationships, high demand from China and highly vulnerable target species explain the other two syndromes distinguished by declining stocks, conflict and debt among fishers.A key finding is that the factors emerging as important for explaining the different syndromes derive from different scales (e.g. local market structures vs distant market characteristics), indicating a need for multi-level governance approaches to deal with the effects of market integration. Furthermore, the meta-analysis shows that each syndrome encompasses fisheries from multiple continents. This suggests that the increasingly global nature of the seafood trade appears to be driving local dynamics by creating similar conditions for vulnerabilities in localities around the world, lending support to the notion of tele-connectivity across geographic space.     

Social and ecological effectiveness of large marine protected areas

Large marine protected areas are increasingly being established to meet global conservation targets and promote sustainable use of resources. Although the factors affecting the performance of small-scale marine protected areas are relatively well studied, there is no such body of knowledge for large marine protected areas. We conducted a global meta-analysis to systematically investigate social, ecological, and governance characteristics of successful large marine protected areas with respect to several social and ecological outcomes. We included all large (>10,000 km²), implemented (>5 years of active management) marine protected areas that had sufficient data for analysis, for a total of twelve cases. We used the Social-Ecological Systems Meta-Analysis Database, and a consistent protocol for using secondary data and key informant interviews, to code proxies for fisheries, ecosystem health, and the wellbeing of user groups (mainly fishers). We tested four sets of hypotheses derived from the literature on small-scale marine protected areas and common-pool resources: (i) the attributes of species and ecosystems to be managed in the marine protected area, (ii) adherence to principles for designing small-scale marine protected areas, (iii) adherence to the design principles for common-pool resource management, and (iv) stakeholder participation. We found varying levels of support for these hypotheses. Improved fisheries were associated with older marine protected areas, and higher levels of enforcement. Declining fisheries were associated with several ecological and economic factors, including low productivity, high mobility, and high market value. High levels of participation were correlated with improvements in wellbeing and ecosystem health trends. Overall, this study constitutes an important first step in identifying factors affecting social wellbeing and ecological performance of large marine protected areas.     

Harnessing scientific and local knowledge to face climate change in small-scale fisheries

Small-scale fisheries in developing regions are particularly vulnerable to climate change, but the assessment of climate-induced changes and impacts are often hampered by the data poor-situation of these social-ecological systems. Based on 40 years of scientific and local ecological knowledge, we provide a coherent narrative about the effects of a marine hotspot of climate change on a small-scale fishery across different geographical and temporal scales. We applied a mixed-methods approach to assess biophysical changes, social-ecological impacts, and the incremental spectrum of actions implemented at multiple levels to increase the adaptive capacity of a small-scale clam fishery. The warming hotspot here analyzed was the fastest-warming region in the South Atlantic Ocean. Long-term changes in wind intensity and direction were also noticeable at a regional scale. Both sea surface temperature and winds showed a clear shifting pattern in the late 1990 s. These climate-related stressors determined ecosystem and targeted population changes (e.g. clam mass mortalities, slow stock recovery rates after ecological shocks, habitat narrowing), and favored harmful algal bloom-forming organisms. Climate-induced drivers also affected the human component of the social-ecological system, preventing fishers from securing a fulltime livelihood and limiting the fishery economic potential. Adaptive responses at multiple levels provided some capacity to address climate change effects, and transformative pathways are being taken to adapt to climate-induced changes over the long-term. Transformative changes were fostered by the local perception of environmental change, shared narratives, sustained scientific monitoring programs, and the interaction between knowledge systems, facilitated by a bridging organization within a broader process of governance transformation. The combination of autonomous adaptations (based on linking social capital and fishery leaders agency) and government-led adaptations were essential to face the challenges imposed by climate change. Our results serve as a learning platform to anticipate threats and envision solutions to a wide range of small-scale fisheries in fast-warming regions worldwide.     

Looking beyond the fisheries crisis: Cumulative learning from small-scale fisheries through diagnostic approaches

The common scientific and media narrative in fisheries is one of failure: poor governance, collapsed stocks, and vanishing livelihoods. Yet, there are successful fisheries – instances where governments and/or communities have maintained or rebuilt stocks, where fishers have robust livelihoods, and where institutions are strong. Scientists and managers alike are becoming increasingly interested in moving beyond the doom-and-gloom stories of fisheries failures toward cumulative knowledge for making fisheries governance more successful. Recent literature has attempted to determine what separates the successes from the failures and better understand how lessons learned for effective fisheries governance can be cumulatively compiled. In this special issue, we present a range of fisheries studies from around the world – Latin America, The Pacific, and East Africa. The studies look at varying fisheries outcomes, including sustainability, cooperation, self-governance, and sustaining livelihoods. The contributions in this special issue all tackle the challenge of exploring, testing, and refining the Diagnostic Framework for Analyzing Social-Ecological Systems developed by Elinor Ostrom as a way to cumulate knowledge on the potential conditions that could be causing a problem or creating a benefit in the governance of small-scale marine fisheries. These articles successfully explore the applicability and contributions of the framework while providing important theoretical refinements for small-scale fisheries.     

Complex resource supply chains display higher resilience to simulated climate shocks

Global resource supply chains deliver products such as fish, rice and minerals from producers to consumers around the world, linking disparate regions and economies. These supply chains are increasingly exposed to the impacts of a changing climate, yet receive little attention relative to the study of the production phase. Too often, business learns from experience if and how their supply chains can withstand and recover from climate shocks with little insight on proactively developing climate resilient supply chains. We use a network-based simulation approach to estimate the resilience of supply chains, particularly to disruption experienced during climate-related extreme events. We consider supply chain examples from three Australian resource industries – fisheries, agriculture and mining – that have experienced climate shocks in recent years. We derive four supply chain indices – evenness, resilience, continuity of supply and climate resilience – to estimate the performance of simple and complex supply chains in each industry. As with ecological systems, we show that complex supply chains with a large number of nodes and links are more resilient to disruption. Critically, all chains, regardless of their complexity, will have diminished resilience as climate disruptions become more frequent. This highlights the importance of considering the broader economic benefits of diversified chains, leading to risk reduction and improved design post-disruption. It also reinforces the importance of a systems approach to risk management in supply chains, particularly in considering adaptation options for addressing direct and indirect impacts on the chain as well as the global challenge of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.     

Social–ecological traps and transformations in dryland agro-ecosystems: Using water system innovations to change the trajectory of development

Recent efforts to achieve a much needed productivity increase in farming systems across semi-arid and dry sub-humid sub-Saharan Africa have highlighted the potential of small-scale water system innovations (SWSIs). This paper takes a social–ecological resilience approach to investigate how this type of water management technology would influence agro-ecosystem dynamics, using a catchment in northeastern Tanzania as an example. The analysis finds that three external drivers (increasing dryspell frequency, population growth, and institutional changes) have interacted with a set of key variables in the studied system to shape a development trajectory over the past half-century where off-farm ecosystem services are being degraded while agricultural yields remain low and people remain poor. The analysis further finds that the evaluated SWSIs have the potential to destabilize feedbacks maintaining this social–ecological trap through several different mechanisms, and thereby open up for new development trajectories. A concluding discussion identifies a number of challenges to this type of transformation in sub-Saharan Africa, and outlines the type of investment approaches that would be needed to go from potential to reality.     

How access to Maine⬢s fisheries has changed over a quarter century: The cumulative effects of licensing on resilience

We describe how the evolution of the licensing system for commercial fisheries in Maine has progressively limited the ability of both fishers and the State to respond to changing environmental circumstances. Over the twenty-five year period from 1990 to 2014 new licenses were created at the rate of about 0.6 per year. The changes that have occurred have not been the result of a strategic policy agenda that was set to decrease fishers⬢ access, but rather the consequence of multiple decades of policy interventions that have sought to improve the socioeconomic and ecological productivity of individual fisheries. However, the cumulative effect has limited the flexibility of individual fishers and created strong economic interests that are incompatible with shifts towards ecosystem-based management. We use this finding to contribute to the literature on resilience, with a specific focus on the relationship between adaptive management and sustainability.     

Governance,complexity, and resilience

This special issue brings together prominent scholars to explore novel multilevel governance challenges posed by the behavior of dynamic and complex social-ecological systems. Here we expand and investigate the emerging notion of “resilience” as a perspective for understanding how societies can cope with, and develop from, disturbances and change. As the contributions to the special issue illustrate, resilience thinking in its current form contains substantial normative and conceptual difficulties for the analysis of social systems. However, a resilience approach to governance issues also shows a great deal of promise as it enables a more refined understanding of the dynamics of rapid, interlinked and multiscale change. This potential should not be underestimated as institutions and decision-makers try to deal with converging trends of global interconnectedness and increasing pressure on social-ecological systems.     

Emergence of co-management governance for Hawai‘i coral reef fisheries

Governance failures associated with top-down management have spawned a myriad of institutional arrangements to engage resource users in decision-making through co-management. Although co-management can take many forms and may not always lead to positive outcomes, it has emerged as a promising governance option available to meet social and ecological goals. Recent research on co-management of small-scale fisheries has used comparative approaches to test factors associated with social and ecological success. Less is known however, about how co-management institutional arrangements emerge and persist in the face of socioeconomic and environmental change. Here, we examine the emergence of co-management governance using a case study from coral reef fisheries in the Hawaiian Islands. We used a mixed methods approach, combining a robust policy analysis and a set of key respondent interviews to trace the evolution of this co-management arrangement. Our research uncovers a set of linked drivers and social responses, which together comprise the emergence phase for the evolution of co-management in this case study. Drivers include resource depletion and conflict, and social responses comprise self-organization, consensus building, and collective action. We share insights on key factors that affect these phases of emergence, drawing on empirical findings from our policy review and key respondent interviews. We conclude by describing ways that our findings can directly inform policy and planning in practice, including the importance of documenting the ‘creation story’ that spawned the new institutional arrangement, ensuring that enabling conditions are present, the complexity of defining community, the connection between process legitimacy and outcomes, and understanding the costs and timelines associated with co-management governance transitions.     

Relating root causes to local risk conditions: A comparative study of the institutional pathways to small-scale disasters in three urban flood contexts

The continued rise of global disaster losses pushes our attention yet further to the causal factors that drive risks, beyond the frame of standardised risk assessment models. A key gap in our understanding of the causality of disasters remains establishing how spatially and temporally distant factors – ‘root causes’ – drive local risk conditions. This is particularly the case for small-scale but high-impact disasters. It includes understanding the role that institutions play in influencing such pathways of risk production. This paper addresses this question using a holistic approach to risk analysis that links past drivers to contemporary conditions. We apply this in three case studies of coastal flood management in urban areas of differential size and integration within the European Union - Rethymno (Crete), Genoa (Italy) and St Maarten (Dutch Caribbean). The paper reveals the importance of local institutions in mediating the impacts of higher-level economic and political changes on local risks. It provides new empirical evidence of the relationship between austerity, institutional reform and local disaster risk reduction. The analysis supports a stronger causal epistemology of resilience to disasters but also leads to re-consideration of the institutional entry points for risk reduction, and the importance of considering context and trade-offs.     

Tinker,tailor or transform: Gender equality amidst social-ecological change

Global visions of environmental change consider gender equality to be a foundation of sustainable social-ecological systems. Similarly, social-ecological systems frameworks position gender equality as both a precursor to, and a product of, system sustainability. Yet, the degree to which gender equality is being advanced through social-ecological systems change is uncertain. We use the case of small-scale fisheries in the Pacific Islands region to explore the proposition that different social-ecological narratives: (1) ecological, (2) social-ecological, and (3) social, shape the gender equality priorities, intentions and impacts of implementing organizations. We conducted interviews with regional and national fisheries experts (n = 71) and analyzed gender commitments made within policies (n = 29) that influence small-scale fisheries. To explore these data, we developed a ‘Tinker-Tailor-Transform’ gender assessment typology. We find that implementing organizations aligned with the social-ecological and social narratives considered social (i.e., human-centric) goals to be equally or more important than ecological (i.e., eco-centric) goals. Yet in action, gender equality was pursued instrumentally to achieve ecological goals and/or shallow project performance targets. These results highlight that although commitments to gender equality were common, when operationalized commitments become diluted and reoriented. Across all three narratives, organizations mostly ‘Tinkered’ with gender equality in impact, for example, including more women in spaces that otherwise tended to be dominated by men. Impacts predominately focused on the individual (i.e., changing women) rather than driving communal-to-societal level change. We discuss three interrelated opportunities for organizations in applying the ‘Tinker-Tailor-Transform’ assessment typology, including its utility to assist organizations to orient toward intrinsic goals; challenge or reconfigure system attributes that perpetuate gender inequalities; and consciously interrogate discursive positions and beliefs to unsettle habituated policies, initiatives and theories of change.     

Insights from experimental economics on local cooperation in a small-scale fishery management system

Cooperation is central to collective management of small-scale fisheries management, including marine protected areas. Thus an understanding of the factors influencing stakeholders’ propensity to cooperate to achieve shared benefits is essential to accomplishing successful collective fisheries management. In this paper we study stakeholders’ cooperative behavioral disposition and elucidate the role of various socio-economic factors in influencing it in the Roviana Lagoon, Western Solomon Islands. We employed a Public Goods Game from experimental economics tailored to mimic the problem of common pool fisheries management to elucidate peoples’ cooperative behavior. Using Ostrom's framework for analyzing social-ecological systems to guide our analysis, we examined how individual-scale variables (e.g., age, education, family size, ethnicity, occupational status, personal norms), in the context of village-scale variables (e.g., village, governance institutions, group coercive action), influence cooperative behavior, as indexed by game contribution. Ostrom's framework provides an effective window for conceptually peeling back the various socio-economic and governance layers which influence cooperation within these communities. The results of our research show that the most important resource user characteristics influencing cooperative behavior were age, occupation and beliefs about giving access to others to fish for commercial gain. Through elucidating the factors affecting stakeholders’ propensity to cooperate to achieve shared benefits, our analysis provides guidance in understanding cooperation in relation to collective management of marine resources.     

How does the World Bank shape global environmental governance agendas for coasts? 50 years of small-scale fisheries aid reveals paradigm shifts over time

Small-scale fisheries are becoming a global social and environmental concern. The contribution of marine small-scale fisheries to global food security and coastal livelihoods, coupled with the significant challenges they face, has attracted increasing attention and aid from environmental organizations, philanthropies, and multilateral agencies over recent decades. Our study attends to the understudied role of the World Bank, the largest individual funder shaping present and future sustainability of coastal marine regions, as a key actor shaping global environmental governance paradigms. We asked how funding to the sector has changed over the last 50 years and why, outlining distinct patterns in the flow of small-scale fisheries aid and the underlying intervention models. We contextualize our quantitative analysis of aid patterns over time with qualitative interview data with bank staff, identifying underlying paradigm shifts driven by internal and external factors. More than $2.48 billion was allocated by the World Bank to marine fisheries over the last 50 years, approximately 47% (~$1.17 billion) of which was targeted to marine small-scale fisheries. Three distinct funding periods are identified: rising support to SSF from the 1970s to mid-1980s; a sharp decline in funding in the mid-to-late 1980s and low levels of funding throughout the 1990s; and a steady return to funding SSF in the mid-2000s up to the present. Over time, Bank-funded interventions shifted from pure economic development in the earlier era, to an emphasis on governance and multi-dimensional environmental goals in the recent period. To understand why, we used key-informant interviews to unpack major internal drivers: internal staff changes and presence of key individuals, the decentralization and recentralization of decision-making, and the organization’s shifting emphasis from traditional economic growth to multi-dimensional objectives of poverty reduction, among others. External drivers behind funding and paradigm shifts included pressure from the environmental movement, the rise of sustainable development discourses, key global environmental summits in the 1990s, and rising levels of interest in the fisheries sector by the governments of both donor and recipient countries. Processes of ‘paradigm shifts’ were not swift or singular, rather they were affected by multiple, convergent factors over time. Our findings contribute to the literature on multi-lateral institutions as key actors in environmental governance shaping global development thinking, illustrating the arc of the last half-century of fisheries aid at the Bank while highlighting present dilemmas and future challenges that actors interested in working towards sustainable marine small-scale fisheries face.     

Empowering NGOs? Long-term effects of ecological and institutional change on regional fisheries management organizations

The participation of environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) in regional fisheries management organizations has inspired optimism among many observers and researchers about increasing the effectiveness of these regional organizations in managing highly migratory and straddling fish stocks sustainably. Others claim that the attendance of ENGOs in meetings of regional fisheries management organizations as accredited observers or as part of member state or cooperating non-member state delegations, could make decision-making complex, long, and inefficient. More generally, NGO participation has attracted broad scholarly interest in the study of interest groups and transnational advocacy in political science. Yet, we know little about the determinants of ENGO participation in meetings of regional fisheries management organizations in the first place. To fill this gap, this article develops a theoretical framework conceptualizing ENGO participation and developing expectations about how ecological and institutional change shapes ENGO participation. The framework deals with structural determinants of ENGO participation, as existing literature primarily has been preoccupied with the study of actor-specific explanations of specific NGOs’ impact in specific political processes. By contrast, we examine how ecological change – such as target fish stock health and biomass status – and institutional change – such as financial resources, membership composition of regional fisheries management organizations and participation by other non-state actors, such as experts and fishing industry representatives – shape ENGO participation. We empirically explore this framework in the context of seven regional fisheries management organizations. A dataset comprising yearly fish stock-level data on participation, institutional, and ecological factors, for 1980–2014, was compiled for our quantitative inquiry into the determinants of ENGO participation. We find robust evidence that institutional change shapes ENGO participation, but not ecological factors related to target fish stock health. We discuss our findings against the backdrop of ongoing debates about NGOs in political science, and spell out broader implications for future research on NGOs in regional fisheries management organizations.     

Sustainability implications of honouring the Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries

The Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries developed in 1995 by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations includes a set of recommendations for reducing the negative impacts of fishing activities on marine ecosystems. The Code is widely believed to be an important tool for fisheries management and, although the Code is voluntary, all stakeholders concerned with the management and development of fisheries, and conservation of fishery resources, are actively encouraged to implement it. Previous analysis at global scale showed widespread low compliance with the Code of Conduct that may be partly due to a lack of empirical support for the overall ecological benefits of adhering to the Code. Here we evaluated these ecological effects by comparing compliance with the Code to changes in five ecological indicators that quantify the ecosystem effects of fishing. We used the loss in production index and the related probability of sustainable fishing index, the mean trophic level of the catch, total catches, and the primary production required to sustain the catch. We also tested if regional differences and development status of countries influenced the results of ecological indicators. Results indicate that countries with higher levels of compliance with the FAO Code of Conduct in 2008 experienced a decrease in the Loss in Production index and an increase in fisheries sustainability from the 1990s to 2000s. We conclude that better implementation of the Code of Conduct may have had overall positive ecological effects with time. A significant decrease in total catch and primary production required with higher compliance was also observed. While a significant increase in ecosystem sustainability was observed after a decade of adoption of the Code at high levels of compliance, further ecosystem degradation had taken place where compliance with the Code was below a given threshold (4, from a ranking of 0–10). Therefore, since compliance with the Code is still low or very low worldwide, these results may encourage individual countries to adopt well-established fishery management measures in order to increase the ecological sustainability of marine resources.     

What role for social–ecological systems research in governing global teleconnections?

The paper considers the extent to which social–ecological systems research might contribute to an improved understanding of the social and environmental impacts of teleconnections inherent in economic globalisation. Recognising the importance and specificity of regional interconnections, wherein actions in certain parts of the world impact quite specifically on the sustainability of certain other spatially distant places and systems, the paper reflects on the social and environmental implications of increasingly interconnected agri-food systems and intersecting global commodity chains. Key elements of social–ecological systems approaches, which have purported relevance to research on globalisation, are critically examined, and aspects of social–ecological systems thinking that pose challenges for its application in this context are considered. Wider implications and limitations of social–ecological systems approaches to research and practice in (global) governance for sustainability are discussed. The general conclusion is that social–ecological systems research may offer insights into the governance of social and environmental impacts of agri-food systems and other complex systems at certain scales. However, the formal utility of concepts like resilience, vulnerability and adaptability becomes considerably less clear as research turns to analyses of larger, complex, globally teleconnected systems, where the main contribution of such concepts may lie in their metaphorical appeal to important aspects of interconnectivity and interdependence.